For his entire career, Kleber Mendonça Filho has relied on the feeling of catharsis to explore what closure might feel like. His films Aquarius (2016) and Bacurau (2019) unveil themselves like fairy tales, mythologies, or even dark and sinister Aesop’s fables. But his two latest movies, Pictures of Ghosts (2023) and The Secret Agent (2025), find themselves wandering around in the abyss, wondering what went wrong, why, and how. They are films that, while not necessarily more grounded in reality (he loves the endearing excesses of genre cinema, after all), study the problems of Brazil’s past that still haunt and inhabit the souls of the present.

Taken as a framed story of two girls researching documents kept by the head of the Brazilian resistance movement during the 70s dictatorshi

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